A vacuum processing apparatus for manufacturing a semiconductor device, an electronic part or the like has a chamber that can exhaust its interior and includes: at least one process module for performing processing on an object to be processed under vacuum; and a transfer module for supplying the object to be processed to the process module. Conventionally, a data collection server is connected to these modules, and thus state data of the process module and the transfer module is constantly collected. The collected state data is used for monitoring the operational condition of the device and analyzing the cause of a failure when the failure occurs (see patent document 1).
The data collection is commonly performed as follows: the data collection server requires the process module or the transfer module to perform transmission by socket communication in accordance with the period of the data collection, and, in response to this requirement, the process module or the transfer module transmits the state data.
[Patent document 1] Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2005-276935